Vignette Corp. has announced the availability of new Vignette V6 adapters
that enable organizations to integrate enterprise content created
in Microsoft Office XP into customer, employee, and supplier Web
sites and portals.

The V6 adapters do not require organizations to install additional
software on each user's desktop or pay additional licensing fees
for each user who contributes content. Instead, they enable workers
to create content in an Office application, save it from the File
menu, and publish it directly to the Vignette content management
application. This non-intrusive approach helps ensure that content
produced with Microsoft Office is easily integrated into the application,
while allowing business users to create documents as they always
have without new training. According to Vignette, other content
management solutions require the addition of extra buttons, macros,
or menus to each copy of Microsoft Office, resulting in increased
training, maintenance, and administration costs.

With the V6 adapters, users and developers can leverage the
enhanced support for XML tagging that's offered in Office XP products
such as Microsoft Word and Excel. The flexibility provided by
XML expands the reusability of content from these desktop applications
to help ensure that business-user content is seamlessly integrated
into other enterprise applications. In addition, when Microsoft
Office content is saved to the Vignette content management application,
the document attributessuch as look and feel, layout, and
custom metadataare maintained.

The adapters can also be used to pull information into Word
documents and Excel spreadsheets. Since Vignette V6 can access
most internal or external systems or data sourcessuch as
ERP and CRM applications, legacy systems, and databasesbusiness
users can retrieve information from these sources and add them
to Word and Excel. Ultimately, this provides easy access to information
and enables users to employ familiar tools such as Word for different
kinds of publishing or, in the case of Excel, for analysis, decision
support, and business reporting.

Vignette offers more than 50 content adapters for a variety
of sources, including desktop authoring tools, XML, enterprise
applications, content repositories, http, FTP, EDI, and RosettaNet.
Integrations with Vignette adapters are created in a graphical
design environment. In most cases no coding is required to deploy
sophisticated content integration processes.